Just as we were going to press, Intel finally announced that it had gotten the long-awaited "Foster" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors, now simply called the Xeon MPs, out the door for midrange and enterprise Wintel and Lintel servers. The Fosters were originally expected to debut about this time last year, but were pushed out again and again as Intel worked on bugs in the chip and perfected its 0.13 micron chip-making process. Server vendors expect to be able to start shipping machines using the Fosters in mid-April.

Hoping to piggyback on the on-going antitrust lawsuit between the U.S. government and Microsoft to exact punishment on its archrival in the software business, Sun Microsystems last Friday launched its own antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the U.S. District Court in San Jose. The lawsuit relies heavily on the rulings of the district and appeals courts in the U.S.-Microsoft case, and Sun is expected to seek damages in excess of $1 billion.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the software giant would have to withdraw the Windows operating system from the market, if a federal court approves the sanctions proposed by the nine states involved in the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. The remedy proposal erodes the economical value of the operating system, he argued. Microsoft released a 143-page legal deposition from Ballmer that was conducted last month. Under questioning by a lawyer representing the states, Ballmer said he would not "know how to comply with" the litigating states' proposal. "We would need to withdraw the Windows product from the marketplace," Ballmer said.

Once promising Linux-developer Mission Critical Linux (MCLX) had to lay off 90 percent of its workforce, or 60 employees, after it failed to sell its business last week. The company cut off its entire services and consulting arm to focus solely on product development. "We need to concentrate on making money; it's a tough business environment," founder Moiz Kohari told Guild Companies. The company plans to put all its resources into improving its Convolo high-availability clustering technology. Convolo comes in two variations, DataGuard and NetGuard, both Linux high-end clusters to prevent server locks through failover capabilities.

If you had to use a single word to describe IBM's Web services vision, it would be heterogeneity. IBM claims it is committed to this strategy and willing to cooperate with its rivals if that is what it takes to keep ahead of the competition. "Web services will be published by one, but have to be readable by all," said John Swainson, general manager for application and integration at IBM's middleware division, at the company's Web Services Day last week.

IBM will not take a stance on the application security efforts of Microsoft's Passport technology and Sun Microsystems' Liberty Alliance Project--at least for the moment. IBM says it will wait until one or the other matures. It will take at least another few months until Passport and Liberty are far enough evolved for IBM to decide which one it wants to go with, said Arvind Krishna, vice president of security products for IBM's Tivoli division, at the company's Web Services Day last week.

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